[Author’s note: As I write this in October, the second massive denial of service attack in two weeks threatening to take down significant sections of the internet has just ended. Could full implementation of Operation Safety-Net have prevented this?

Had you been in the general vicinity of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago– say, Thursday evening, maybe just before an early dinner time – you might have heard thunderous applause spilling from the open entrance into the evening air. You might have thought an A-list celebrity had just been introduced on stage to the gathered membership of M3AAWG, as our 33rd General Meeting drew to a close.

M3AAWG was formed almost ten years ago over concerns that email, one of the Internet’s two “killer apps” at the time, might collapse due to out-of-control volumes of spam. Fortunately today, even with vastly more spam bombarding the networks, our operator members report they’re now able to stop about 90 percent of abusive messages before they reach users’ inboxes, per our email metrics reporting program.

Over the past few years, and particularly these past six months, there’s been an uptick in abused systems and abusive clients taking up residence on systems in hosting and data centers. To expedite a community effort in remediating some of these attacks, we have launched a new M3AAWG Hosting SIG with these initial activities: